Friday, August 10, 2007

Textures

I've been playing around with textures in Adobe Illustrator. Encouraged by the thoughts on the topic of Von Glitschka, and the pictures of several other illustrators, including Jeffrey Pelo, I decided to give it a try. Since I do a lot of watercolor painting, I am partial to the look of natural textures. So this is a great way to "naturalize" the slick perfection of color blends and builds in Illustrator and Photoshop.

The drawing itself started from one of my sketchbook drawings. I scanned it in and traced it Illustrator. I then colored it with flat colors using various levels of transparency. At this point all the colors were very flat, so I wanted to crunch it up a bit. So I ran outside with my digital camera and shot the road surface in front of my house. I brought it into the computer and loaded it up. I think it worked well!